August 7, 2018

Though this site has never really gotten much traffic, I know that a few people still end up here, many of them from the content that’s really more become my bread-and-butter since it’s listed in the description of every video I make. So since it’s been almost exactly two years now since the last update, let’s talk a bit.

This website launched in 2007, with a revised appearance in 2008, and for the longest time adding pages to the stories here was by far my most ardent endeavour. It was perhaps my first real hobby and it provided a sense of stability in my life and gave me a world I could always dive back into.

Times have marched on however. It takes a lot of time to make comic pages, and in a given week I also have to film and edit videos, host livestreams, develop programming, and manage the Patreon that allows me to do all of these things with reasonable economic security. In the old days I’d easily be able to squeeze in drawing between all my homework or coursework, but time is a fraught commodity now. I certainly don’t dislike my current situation, I’m getting to explore my creativity in so many new avenues and formats and there’s no-one able to tell me any of it is a waste, but making comics is difficult.

Moreover, the site is incredibly dated, having been last updated very nearly an entire decade ago. One of the earliest goals on the Patreon campaign was in fact to update the look of things around here, but that was somewhat rapidly thrown out the window when the campaign’s initial success meant I was swiftly deprived of the unemployment benefits that were keeping me alive. I’m still not up to the point where the support of my (continually wonderful and amazing) community is enough to reliably tick all the proverbial boxes of my monthly financial checklist, so it will likely continue to look like this for some time. Eventually I would like this site to be a sort of hub or nexus for everything I’m doing, not just comics but also the videos, social media pages, streams, and the like, but it certainly isn’t there now. I confess I’ve grown somewhat embarrassed by the site in that regard.

Some good news: The stories aren’t over. Michael’s story has only just begun, and I still know his next steps and where he’s going in the long term. I can’t promise comic pages in the near future, I can’t promise written or audio instalments, but that story is still waiting in the future. I don’t know when it will arrive, but it’s not going away.

Additionally, this site isn’t going away either. There’s no need to mass-download any pages or anything, remain calm, I’m not shutting things down until I can actually support them and the economic costs of hosting everything here isn’t sufficient to nosedive me further into poverty. I’ll even keep it listed in the video descriptions, for old time’s sake.

If/when the total from Patreon finally hits that minimum wage level where it’s covering all my bases, that goal of refreshing things here is coming back and we’re getting things fixed up. Perhaps after that I can even shake up my livestream schedule and slide in a comic drawing stream each week. I’d like that. In the meantime, check out the Patreon page (which I have been shamelessly linking throughout this post) to help out towards that objective, watch the videos, hang out in the streams, and poke your head into the public Discord full of lovely peeps who similarly enjoy the stuff I make.